Labrys
by Dalliancetreads
Summary: "So join or die, is that it?" Bree is offered an alternative future. Jane/Bree. One-shot.


**Pairing:** Jane/Bree

**Rating:** M for strong language and sexual themes

This au starts at the end of _The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner_. It contains quotes and spoilers.

* * *

><p>Jane wanted to take me to dark-cloak city, and she called it <em>mercy<em>_? _I snorted. More like a last-ditch effort to cover up her dirty politics.

"Make your choice, preferably before I stop caring," Jane said, appearing to actually seethe with apathy.

I was hoisted to my feet by Jasper. He kept both hands firmly clasped on my shoulders — I guess he didn't trust me to control my bloodlust. Wise man. As much as I liked Bella, affection wouldn't stop me shredding her swan-like throat.

I tried to think about the situation at hand and not Bella's throat, or Diego, or the numbness slowly pooling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn't wrap my head around _superfluous appendages_. What superfluous appendages did Diego watch getting turned into a puff of lilac smoke? I had to know. But the term had slid from Riley's jewel-bright lips like a baby, already complete unto itself.

Get a grip, Bree.

"So join or die, is that it?"

I was almost begging Jane to vamoose me again. I wanted to prove to her I wasn't scared. I'm pretty confident nothing will ever get to me again.

Besides, Jane looked as worn as a gnawed-on fishbone. I might've felt sorry for her if she smiled with a normal smile and not a curved-lips grinning-skull torture-twisted smile like the offspring of Elizabeth Bathory and Satan.

"Felix, take care of this," she drawled. "I want to go home."

[o]

The leader of the Volturi was a monster stitched together from the minds of a thousand fallen men. Aro had a firm grip on things, like an auctioneer or an ax murderer, the thing presently being my hand. I looked into the middle distance and tried very hard not feel every eye since Babylon stare me down.

He stepped back some, suit unruffled, face unruffled, absorption of another identity complete.

"Heidi will find you a suitable position, I'm sure."

I gaped around the finality of his words. "Wait! Wait..."

Aro raised his eyebrows and the pendulum of Pydna swung upwards, in Alexander The Great's favour.

I strained for words. It probably didn't matter that I'd lick the crap off his Santonis if he just let me live. He's a better liar than Riley, but I'm not a girl who looks up every time someone spells _gullible_ on the ceiling. The stippled grey ranks of his underlings don't boast children without terrible wounds warped into weapons. There's no place for me.

As my dad would say, my fritters were fried. I'm bacon. I'm toast. I'm a walking doom buffet.

A boy with the same curly black hair as Diego snickered and my stomach lurched as I remembered the enigmatic _superfluous appendages_. I remembered Alexander The Great died with sweat in his eyes under a burning sun in every retelling of his story. Some endings just _are_.

"... never mind."

[o]

They say bad luck comes in threes. Well, my welcome to Volterra was a milky grey robe, a mop and bucket. The Volturi Castle was collapsing under the weight of its own expanse — the endless arterial mishmash of corridors and galleries filmy with layers upon layers of ancient grime, the air a blast of bad breath and fossilised cobwebs supporting spiders too fat for their spindly little legs. Cleaning was an Augean job, purposed for the nameless, thankless and soon to vanish.

"A stony reception, hey," I said to the castle bedrock. The filth and darkness seemed so far from Diego's sun-sweetened kiss it made my heart ache.

Over several weeks, I bleached everything into oblivion but the grime proved too fastidious, too entrenched for my chemicals. I discovered enough scrubbing could wipe the fingerprints from your hands but couldn't slow the decay of time.

I gave up on the corridors and set my sights on the private rooms, a queerer and less pleasant country. I crept past weeping shadows and secrets splitting open like rotting fruit, the little agonies displayed behind glass netted with age.

Then in the sanctum of Volterra I stumbled across the holiest place on Earth.

It was a small, blue-coloured room; the wallpaper haphazardly glued to walls peeling at the corners as if the hands that pressed it couldn't quite reach. Shelves from floor to ceiling jutted out like pike jaws, groaning under the weight of a holy burden so astounding in magnitude the white rind of my heart just about leapt off.

Marching from the shelves into Salvation was row after row of Virgin Mary statuettes. Some marble-white, bronze or rendered in full colour; some as small as my thumb or as big as a lamp; some so elaborate they echoed life, others a blank bleary conflation of faces and limbs; some balancing baby Jesus on their hip, some with hands clasped devoutly and some managing both at once.

The rest of the furniture looked stolen from a life-sized doll's house but before I could speculate further I heard the pitter-patter of footsteps in the corridor.

I jumped behind a curtain just as Jane walked through the door. It's funny, I wouldn't think this sinless place belonged to her. Then again most psychopaths think they're some variation of Jesus.

Her face was full of an ethereal will o' the wisp light. She moved to the standing mirror, flourishing a white napkin that she neatly tucked around her head. She canted her neck to make the muscles stand out. I was lost until she knitted her hands together. A living statuette, a black Madonna.

When she started stuffing pillows up her pinafore, I took an incautious step backwards into a shelf of the Legion of Mary.

She twisted round with a hiss rising in her throat and eyes a devouring obsidian.

I stumbled from my hiding place, arms raised protectively, brain scrabbling to find a scrap of mercy.

"I see you like, um, Mary," I said lamely. Realising how dumb that sounded I tried again. "I had you pinned for an Old Testament kind of girl — all that rage and smiting and fire. They were so afraid of God in those days it's amazing they could write between the bowel evacuations. But they wrote page after page of the most ridiculous rules, have you even read Leviticus? Yeah, probably. _Thou shalt not pick your nose..._"

Great, now you're in for it. "The Bible was the only book in our house — I mean me n' my dad's house — if you don't count the TV magazines. Always seemed to be in arms' reach. Dad used it to whack me over the head and shoulders. Guess it's better than the beer bottle he used the week before I ran away from home..."

I realised I had said far, far more than I desired. Jane remained stiff and silent, her skin blue and belly artificially swollen. She looked like the puckered corpse of a prostitute fished from a city river.

"The soundtrack of your life must be in G major, huh?"

"Get out," she said in a voice guttural and demented and not remotely human.

[o]

I was on my knees, scrubbing the pink stains of our regular feedings from the stonework. The axe pressed heavily against my neck these days.

"Congratulations," a voice said behind me. "You've been promoted."

Spinning and rising to my feet with thoughtless grace, I discovered the lemon-curd tone of the news-bearer was none other than Heidi. Her body was the potent snakeskin of a lustful god, swelling and sagging with the desire to drown you, not hold you. I couldn't stop staring at her lips — the morbid red of a plum bloated with maggots. I noticed my formless grey cloak was getting holes at the knees.

She threw another cloak at me. I twined my hands through the darker fabric.

"One of the upper guards favoured you," she said.

"What? Jane?" I scoffed.

Her lips pinched together, the puffy red squeezed so tight I thought it might pop. "Follow me, please."

What... Jane? This must be a joke.

She turned heel and sped off deeper into the castle. I followed, trying not to lose her.

"You'll work in one of our libraries," Heidi continued. "Some of our historical documents need... editing. It is a task for sharp eyes and a quick mind. This is the chamber you will spend your days and nights in." She took a set of keys from her belt and unfastened the door.

Immediately, I was overcome by the powerful aroma of old books, mildew, dust motes — the sticky kind you can't wash out of your hair — and insect droppings. It was a heavenly concoction. For the first time in this wretched castle, I felt the ghost of a promise of a glimmer of hope.

Heidi smiled thinly and handed me two things: a craft knife and a list of names and dates. "Now, listen. This chamber contains the archives of all the trials the Volturi has held for the last three hundred years. I need you to find the names on the list and cut them out so they cannot be read. Then burn the scraps and the list. Got it?"

I nodded. It seemed wrong to be erasing people from legal documents but I wasn't exactly shocked. I'd take it any day over cleaning time's toilet bowel.

"You will also be transcribing badly damaged annuals into new books, okay? Any questions?"

"Did Jane really do this for me?"

I could see her considering silence, the dribbling wound of her mouth parting to reveal strong teeth, horses' teeth, and a pink tongue that moved to and fro like a worm in the sun. "Some of us earn our place here with distinction, discipline and years of dedication," she said. "Then there's you and your kind."

I felt the chill of iron against the back of my neck. "Yeah?" I said faintly. "Tell me, did you earn your place on your back... or on your knees?"

She eyed me distastefully, the kind of look a rich kid gives his Brussels sprouts on a Sunday evening. "It's never a free ride, little girl. You will pay — we all do, in our own ways. But I have no desire to share your tainted coin."

She left me with my ringing, increasingly sundering thoughts and the taste of an axe under my tongue.

However, she had a point. I didn't need to be talented to survive — I just needed to be adored. If you turn out anything like your mother you'll have thighs as slippery as oil, was the old man's refrain. This would be an unsurprising development for you, huh, daddy o. You were right about the pill between my legs. It was there all along.

[o]

In a forgotten crease of an afternoon, I hacked away in the archives, a happy little bookworm lost in her world of words. The difficult part was the tangle of languages in which the annuals were written — Italian, German, English and a strain of Spanish shot through the 19th century. The usual format was name, date and terse description of death. Jane was a too-frequent dealer. The tips of my fingers became blackened like an old woman flipping through the newspaper obituaries that were her social circle.

If you were really paying attention, you'd notice telltale tracks through dust where they shouldn't be, the most recent annual stuffed back on the shelf a shade too untidily and the ink of the most recent entry slightly darker than its brothers.

It goes like this.

_Diego, 2006. He died after she tore off his legs and then slowly, slowly, burnt off his fingers, ears, lips, tongue and every other superfluous appendage __one by one. He was blessed with an almost unnoticeable, steel-strong gift: he made the vampires around him feel human. Weak, yes — but like we had a chance to be better. He was friendly and honest, that's why he died. The world has decided you either die young or live long enough to see yourself grow hateful and cold. _

_I loved him. Oh, I loved him. But I wouldn't be able to hug him tight enough or kiss him fierce enough to save him. There's too many ways feeling human can destroy you._

I worked away afternoons and the pain unfurled bitter and black. I had a sneaking suspicion Diego was now a standard, far beyond me, a name on a flag at the top of a mountain in my mind almost too painful to think about.

The game was survival now, so I couldn't have these carrion-crow thoughts circling me. I forced it down and got up like a solider with a bullet in his lung rising to fight again.

[o]

"Jane requests your presence in her chamber," Heidi spat through the keyhole on her way down the corridor.

No other words could fill me with such trepidation. Rumours clung to her and her shadowy twin closer than flies on shit, too emphatic and tendentious not to be true. I wiped my black hands on a rag and went to seek my new love, my darling Jane. I promised I'd think about Diego on Halloween.

She was perched at a desk, her back a perfect plumb bob. The Marys wassailed me with their plastic limbs and fake babies without the tiniest shred of help or comfort. As I approached, I noticed her hands resting on an old book, and I'm a fan of old books. It was bound in leather and set with gemstones, pages thick as sin and intricately illuminated.

"Wow, cool book!"

Her hand trembled slightly. I'd think her singularly aseptic if it wasn't for the restrained passion that tremor belied.

"It was my father's Bible. We have that in common," the girl said coolly. "I was thinking about what you said about Leviticus."

"And?" I stood behind her and casually let my hand drop over hers. I made a clumsy seductress but I hoped what I lacked in expertise, Jane made up for in innocence.

"It is a little silly," she breathed, giggling a little as she curled her fingers round my own.

"Yeah, I think it went overboard with that bats part."

She laughed in a shrill whisper then stopped herself.

"C'mon, who's going to hear?" I reconsidered. "You don't actually believe in God, do you?"

She was silent for a while. "Yes," she said, simply and awfully.

"But didn't you... didn't you burn at the stake?"

She jerked her hand away from mine. The apathy came down again like a MC waving his arms and saying show's over, folks.

"I don't understand," I said.

"That's your problem."

"But your belief is in utter contradiction with your actions!"

"I would have gone to paradise," Jane said, hard-edged and quick. "I would have died a martyr, as a solider in the army of the Lord, I would have been Saved." Like Hercules, like Joan of Arc, like those Tibetan monks in 1968 so determined to prove a point they doused themselves with octane, Jane thought she could burn herself into immortality (to her credit, she was kind of right).

"And instead you got... this."

She nodded but she didn't look at me. Rage unlooped behind her eyes as if the gates of Heaven dangled before her like carrots on a stick. There was a need to purge, not just herself but the world, to make people taste their blood burning, her conviction ensnared in a great fear to carry it out, fear and uncertainty and desperation a fever pitch beating against her ribcage.

Her dull being plodded on without even noticing it was ripping itself into two: one half divine, the other a crimson-eyed creature digging her heels in and dancing in fire. There were large canvasses of herself she didn't dare explore, the parts I indiscriminately exploited.

"Do you believe in the Rapture?"

"Yes," she said and I squeezed her hand again over the last earthly possession of her father not borne from the womb of her mother.

[o]

I was sure of myself walking back to the dingy archives. Not safe — I don't think that's possible with Jane — but my death didn't seem like a sure done thing.

I wasn't aware of the boy waiting for me until I nearly collided with him.

"Sorry," I said meekly.

"You are Bree, are you not?" He said, each word drawn out ponderously. "You want to fuck my sister."

"And you must be Alec. Delightful..." my lungs started to itch and I dissolved into a coughing fit. He stood there with a tiny smirk on his cherubic lips as I sunk into deep unconsciousness before I even hit the floor.

[o]

_Blackness lay upon me as unassailable as smoke. I coughed it out only to discover I did not have lungs. I was nothing spinning in nothingness. If Alec were going to kill me, I wouldn't even know it. I tried to scream but I did not have a voice. _

[o]

The grey light of dawn — or evening — pierced my eyelids. The scents and smells of the outside world swaddled me and as if from far away I heard the melody of birdsong. Dawn, then.

My body hurt everywhere, like every surface had been pummelled with vicious little hands and feet. There was a splitting pain in my jaw and somewhere further down... deeper inside.

I opened my eyes. I was lying on the red parapets that crowned the castle, naked and spread-eagled on the harsh stone. My clothes were nowhere to be seen.

There was a terrible emptiness in my mouth. I reached a hand in and quickly recoiled — where my front teeth should've been there was only slippery gum. I whimpered.

Below, I was aware of a clotting pain, more urgent and frightening than the other. I sat up and a certainty bloomed as sharp as acid as I felt the tiny claws of _something_ when I shifted my abdomen.

Here's some psychology for you: I never quite worked up the courage to put a tampon in. Years ago, it was just me on the bathroom toilet with match-box sized diagrams, my dad outside racketing to take a piss and not understanding his daughter was attempting to undergo a transformation.

My fingers shook as they found that slit now. I breathed out, slowly, as the advice went, and slipped a finger in. It was almost to the base when I felt the first hard little lump. I tried fishing it out but it burrowed deeper, slicing the sensitive flesh inside me. I cried out, but wriggled my finger harder until I had a gristly white seed in a hand drenched with blood.

I repeated the procedure for three more teeth. Wave after wave of repulsion washed over me — there was breathtaking cruelty in the designs of this 12-year-old, more than your typical newborn tearing off an arm in unweaned rage. This was calculated to degrade. Huh, that will teach you, you whore.

I felt blistering anger then. I made a vow that I'd tear off his frigid little cock if he ever so much as touched me again.

In a cold rush I realised what _superfluous appendages _meant. A man had three on his navel.

I couldn't help but laugh, sickly, the taste of death speckling my lips. I could thank Alec for solving that mystery.

Sometime later, I went in search for a mirror to reattach my teeth. As I left I peeled a layer off, a ghost Bree forever shivering on the parapets with her eyes tight closed, a confession for the stones and indifferent sky.

[o]

Admittedly, it's a small change, but these days I don't let instinct take over when I feed. I let the human writhe in my grasp and if they're docile I snap a few bones. I squeeze them until they wheeze and bleed from fascinating orifices. Every shake something different falls out. When the pleas rise to the corners of their mouths like the pink bubbles of a punctured lung, my fingers tap the keys of their spine as I draw them closer to share a secret stained crimson. I'm not a clean eater like the others. My mouth closes over their necks and they scream and thrash and I don't stop ripping and chewing until they are a fetid mass of skin and bone shards and hair.

My victims all inevitably have black curly hair. It's an ungual fever dream I can't shake so I concede it must be real.

No one's noticed me change. Perhaps I was always like this.

[o]

I was walking the familiar route to Jane's when I was bowled over by a woman running at top speed.

"You ruined me!" She screamed, her lion's talons tearing my cloak, my neck, my face. I don't just lie there — I pummelled back with all my might. My hands wracked across her face, leaving marks gouged in bone. It's been more than a year since I turned and my newborn ferocity has well and truly left. I distantly realised I'm losing and this woman will kill me. It's simple physics — she's a lot larger than my fifteen-year-old body. Each one of her hits rattled harder than ten of mine.

Her neck snapped back and eyes rolled upwards and an unearthly scream emanated from her throat. I watched the cartilage on her neck jump up and down frantically to support the sound.

"My, my, Renata," Jane said with apathy-drenched derision. "The new colour makes you look a little... pale. Are you unwell?"

Jane cooed like a bird just come into its feathers as she pulled tighter on the place where her gift came from. Renata spasmed on the floor, rolling round like an animal. I said nothing.

I could feel something finally break away from me, white and sealed from any introspection, sinking like the hull of a ship into the deep. Soon, I forgot it was ever there.

Jane's pastel smile finally slackened and Renata's screams ebbed into a senseless gibber, the bellows of her lungs pumping up and down. "How could he do this to me — I'm the best shield, damn what they say — oh, if we never knew about Fred, this wouldn't have happened, this is all Bree's fault, she showed him what Fred could do — my beautiful ebony cloak — how could he abandon me, my Aro, oh my lovely Aro—"

"Quiet," Jane said, careless as the day her eyes were dark as roses. Today, they're canna lilies. "Leave now."

"Are you hurt, Bree?" She asked when we were alone. Still on the floor, I nodded.

I felt the swish and current of her through the air as she sat down and took my head into her lap. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, as though sympathy was a lovers' secret. There was something loosening inside her, a gasping knot that had long held too tight unwinding. I was certain it would lead to the cooling of her gift.

I refused to let that happen. Her pain was my insurance policy, the maelstrom to my eye. This place was no better than Riley's basement. More civilised, perhaps, but more savage. They knew how to hit hard and they didn't miss.

I'd pull her til she was tight as a bow again.

"S'okay," I whispered back. Her fingers traced over my chin as her eyes opened with the tentative wonder of a child. She pulled my chin up for a kiss; it was devouring and full of bite and shared nothing with the kiss I care not to remember. There are galaxies here, a billion years and a secret fire to catch the eye of a god.

But it did not compel me. My hands idly wind under her cloak and I'm curious.

I'm curious if her heart would fit in the palm of my hand.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note: <strong>Hey thanks for reading! My thanks go to DramaDramaDrama for being a very lovely test audience. She's an amazing writer and I encourage you all to read through her works.

I haven't written in a long time and this is my first attempt at a first person perspective. If you can spare the time, please review and tell me what you think! Reviews make me a shinier, happier, improved writer :D


End file.
